J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

ISBN 978-1-84976-386-8

Joseph Mallord William Turner The Confluence of the Meuse and the Sambre at Namur, Looking Upstream; Continuation of Sketch of the Brick-Built Church of Notre-Dame by the Hospice d'Harscamp 1824

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775–1851
Folio 15 Recto:
The Confluence of the Meuse and the Sambre at Namur, Looking Upstream; Continuation of Sketch of the Brick-Built Church of Notre-Dame by the Hospice d’Harscamp 1824
D20108
Turner Bequest CCXVII 15
Pencil on off-white wove paper, 99 x 162 mm
Watermark ‘[...]lls | 1[...]’
Inscribed in pencil by Turner ‘Brick | [?Cornice] Windows’ top right
Inscribed in blue ink by Ruskin ‘15’ top right and ‘247’ bottom right
Stamped in black ‘CCXVII–15’ bottom right
 
Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856
Drawing from a boat, here Turner records a view of the confluence of the Meuse and Sambre Rivers at Namur, similar to those depicted on Tate D20104–D20105, D20106; Turner Bequest CCXVII 12a–13, 14. Turner is the furthest away from the citadel and promontory here, and subsequently able to take a wider angled view of Namur’s topography. At left are steps leading up to buildings from the river’s edge. At right is the Hospice d’Harscamp, a place of respite for the sick and elderly endowed by one of Namur’s wealthiest aristocratic families. At top right Turner has drawn a small detail of an eighteenth-century church belonging to the Hospice, the église Notre-Dame d’Harscamp, on the rue Saint-Nicolas.1 Beneath this detail are the inscriptions: ‘Brick | Cornice Windows’.2
1
‘Historique’, Espace culturel d’Harscamp, accessed 22 January 2014, http://eglisenotredamenamur.jimdo.com/le-bâtiment/historique
2
Cecilia Powell, Turner’s Rivers of Europe: The Rhine, Meuse and Mosel, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1991, Appendix p.211.
Verso:
There is the very briefest continuation of the view on Tate D20109; Turner Bequest CCXVII 16.

Alice Rylance-Watson
January 2014

How to cite

Alice Rylance-Watson, ‘The Confluence of the Meuse and the Sambre at Namur, Looking Upstream; Continuation of Sketch of the Brick-Built Church of Notre-Dame by the Hospice d’Harscamp 1824 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, January 2014, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, April 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-confluence-of-the-meuse-and-the-sambre-at-namur-looking-r1174304, accessed 29 March 2024.